


An Oculus

by SaxyFangurl



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: A Lot Of Healing Must Happen, Fix-It, Gen, Graphic Description, I cried writing this, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, Leonard Snart Lives, Police Brutality, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-28
Updated: 2017-10-04
Packaged: 2019-01-06 15:41:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12213849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SaxyFangurl/pseuds/SaxyFangurl
Summary: Leonard Snart isn't sure if he's survived the Oculus or not, but he knows that something's wrong. There's something wrong with him, and he's not sure what that is yet. But he will escape the time stream, that is guaranteed.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hi guys, and welcome to the darkest thing I have ever written. I'm serious, I cried writing this, but don't worry, it'll definitely get better. I loosely based my writing style in the beginning off of Dalton Trumbo just because it seemed to fit this type of story. I own nothing.

Leonard Snart used to think his father was a cruel man, but now he knows that Fate is even crueler.

He is drowning in a void of pitch black, helplessly floating as he heard people calling his name. He had heard his sweet, beloved sister and the roughness of his best friend. He had heard Barry and Sara and his father, each calling upon him with varying degrees of harshness. No matter how hard he tried to respond, he couldn't. He felt like he was permanently slack-jawed and still. He would hover forever in the endless sea of darkness, hearing people call him, but never being able to respond.

He wanted to assume that he was alive. After all, he was thinking, that had to mean something.

Or maybe this was his hell. Floating around uselessly in the dark unable to answer the call of his name.

Someone called again, and this time, it was Raymond. Leonard's own name rung throughout his eardrums, the only thing that could be heard in this vast quantity of darkness. God, why couldn't Haircut understand that he was really trying to answer but his mouth isn't working and it's sickening him and shocking him and making him quake. He felt the same electricity of the Oculus shocking him and tearing at his insides. Oh God, Oh God, why couldn't Raymond just shut up?

Had the electricity of the Oculus killed him? Or had he force of the blast gotten to him first. At times, he felt like he could feel both. The shocks and the tears melding into a numbness that Leonard could associate with this darkness. Was he truly in darkness, though. Maybe the heat from the Oculus had killed him and boiled his eyeballs. That would explain this black.

He could deal with being blind. He'd never have to see the wretched Oculus again and what more could he ask? Sure, he'd never see his sister or best friend again, but he made sure that both were safe. That was the entire point of sacrificing himself. He took up the burden he didn't want Mick to bare. Lisa would be fine, she'd been by herself for such long periods of time that being an older brother felt kind of useless at times.

He heard someone. And they weren't calling his name.

A soft humming filled his void, and for a second, Leonard thought he could open his eyes. The melodic tune was accompanied by the brief pattering of feet and the swish of a long skirt.

He suddenly felt like he was five years old again.

He's five years old, and his mother is moving about behind him, walking quickly and humming show tunes. An old, small, and outdated radio sits within Leonard's grasp, and he is content with switching the dial to move from static station to static station.

His mother walks in front of him and for a minute he felt like he could not breathe. She was talking to someone, probably his father, which is just enough incentive for him to not turn around. She crouches down and places her dark hands on his knees, affectively stopping the swinging of his feet. She stares at him and smiles and Leonard knows that she's about to do the worst thing she's ever done.

"I love you," she says to him, smiling as she tweaked one of his ears. Leonard wants to look up and say I love you too please don't leave me, but he doesn't make a sound. His eyes never look up from the dumb old radio. Then, his mother is gone, and she's never going to be coming back.

Leonard wants to get up and run and scream and call back his mother, but she's gone. He had one responsibility as a child, and that was to love his mother. However, he'd gone and blew it because he couldn't remove his eyes from the dusty dial on the radio. He wanted to hurl the radio at the ground, or his father, or someone just as bad. Maybe he could put it by his ears and deafen himself, then he wouldn't have to listen to everyone calling his name.

The darkness is back, his mother having taken all the light with her when she left. Maybe he did deserve this. He lies and he cheats and he steals. Only this time he stole something from himself.

Someone thought this was funny. He could distantly hear laughter, and the electricity has gotten worse. It's gotten so bad that he's vibrating and folding in half. Only, it's not electricity. It's laughter. The person who thought his situation was funny was him.

Leonard had been a bad person for such a long time. His life was just an endless cycle of lying and cheating and stealing with an occasional murder here and there. However, he had never truly felt the consequences of such actions. Sure there was jail and the fights and the injuries, but he always managed to make it out of a situation with the upper hand. Bad people don't get punished. Bad people don't sacrifice themselves and end up tortured alone in darkness.

Good people do.

What's the point of being a good person if you're just going to end up dying for an unimportant cause? No one had known about the Oculus. Trillions of people had already lived and died under it's reign, so why must it have been stopped? There's no such thing as a noble death. Whether someone dies nobly or dishonorably they end up six feet under being eaten by insects. Well, most people do. He supposed he might just be a splat on the wall or a shadow on the ground.

If he was a bad person, he'd still be alive. How can he say that he's a survivor if he didn't survive? Bad people live on while the good die young and nameless.

He felt a hand on his shoulder, and a person pulling him close to his chest. But Leonard wasn't going to fall for this again. His mother hadn't been real, and this isn't either. He's still floating in the dark, not being clutched to his best friend's chest.

But he is. The room has taken up an amber hue as the world burns around him. The heat is unbearable, and he's vaguely aware that he cannot move. Mick is hugging him to his chest, his eyes pleading and apologetic. Mick yanks him, and a board that had crushed and pulverized his leg slides off. Smoke fills his head and stings his eyes. He's thrown upwards, held bridal style as Mick sprints for the exit. Forgetting his lighter next to were Leonard had lay.

He used to be more important to Mick than fire. Mick could stare at burning embers for days, but the second Leonard walked in the room his attention shifted. Now, he's not. When Mick burns the world, Leonard will die right with it. He had laid another fist against Mick. Maybe he had survived he Oculus and the electricity and the burning and the darkness was all Mick following up on his promise? No, Mick wouldn't do that.

It's not the first time he's broken a promise.

The most tragic part about the endless darkness is the nothingness. His hyperactivity was the only thing killing him here. He wanted, no needed, to do something. Tap a foot, clap his hands together, walk around. Anything. But he couldn't. It was as if he was wrapped in hundreds of layers of blankets. The heat baking him as he lay helpless, entombed within the blankets.

He can feel a building pressure in his throat and behind his where his eyes were. He felt like he wanted to cry. He hadn't done that in decades. The last time he cried his father had hit his sister with a broken bottle, and here he was, crying over literally nothing.

He expected to hear his sob first, he didn't.

He heard the little sniffles of his baby sister as he returned home from juvie. She walked around in week old clothes and uncombed hair. The dust was layered on everything so thick that every breath ended in a sneeze. Beer bottle lined the floor and the tables and the chairs and the stairs. The house stank of beer and cigarette smoke.

And so did Lisa.

She rushed him, grabbing him by the knees and stared longingly into his eyes. He'd thought the hygiene in juvie was bad, but it appeared as if he'd gotten the better end in this situation.

And how he wished he hadn't.

He wanted to take his baby sister and hold her and make all of her pain go away, but he couldn't do that. He was only human.

He grabbed her and walked to their bathroom. His sister shrieked at the cold water, but it was the only way she'd get clean. What had started off as a few sniffles had turned into heartbreaking shrieks and sobs, but she was clean.

He felt horrible.

The crying stopped, leaving him floating in an eerie darkness. He couldn't tell if he was crying himself. He might be, but he can't hear any sobs or feel any tears.

He makes no qualms about knowing what death is like, but if he had to guess, this would be it. But dead men can't think, speak, or remember. So he must not be dead, and isn't that a disappointing thought?


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Leonard becomes aware that someone might be taking advantage of him.

Leonard wasn't truly in darkness.

Sure, he couldn't see anything, but he was feeling much more than he had before. There was a hard, smooth surface under him, so smooth that he felt as if he were laying on glass. Everyone once and awhile it would jolt, leaving him rocking back and forth slightly. Leonard assumed that he must be on some futuristic hospital bed, yet why anyone would think a lack of a mattress and pillows was an improvement escaped him.

He still occasionally wondered if he was dead or not, but that was mostly past him. Leonard believed that he was living. Sometimes he could feel hands on him. They wrapped bandages around some of his wounds and pressed down on various points of his body, probably searching for some kind of internal damage.

The hands were always large and rough, but not always the same hands. He knew that three people, presumably men, were treating his injuries. Leonard didn't know them, but he was grateful for their care and company. It had been getting lonely floating around in darkness battling off hallucinations. Now, he knew that someone was out there who knew of him, and that was a comforting thought. Maybe they've got loose lips, and the information of his existence would circle around until Mick heard it.

But Mick must hate him.

Leonard knew to trust his instincts by now, and Mick had been dead serious when he had told him not to ever lay a hand upon him again. Leonard could not guarantee that Mick had forgiven him, and there was no use getting his hopes up.

He felt a squish of wetness burst from behind some of the bandages, and he knew that he was bleeding again. However, he did not know why. This was not the first time it had happened. He knew this because no matter what hallucination he was in, it always woke him up. It happened every dozen hallucinations or so.

Oh God, how long had he been like this?

Did his hallucinations last only for a few seconds, or did they stretch on for days, maybe weeks at a time?

He was startled from his train of thought when a pair of hands started to undo the bandages where he had started bleeding. These hands were not the roughest of the three, but they weren't the smoothest either. Paying attention to what they felt like, Leonard could identify certain calluses on his hands that led him to believe that the person currently wrapping his bandage was an archer.

The archer wasn't his favorite of the three, that title belonged to the one who could bandage him in seconds, but he wasn't his least favorite. He wasn't as rough with Leonard as the last of the three was, and he certainly didn't pull the bandages nearly as tight.

The archer's hands clenched for a moment before starting to unravel the bandages he had started to wind around his arm. Leonard felt like rolling his eyes because the man had messed up somehow.

It's not like he wasn't experienced. The first hands Leonard could remember being on him belonged to the archer, but how else could you explain the sudden need to start all over again? Unless...

Unless something changed with him.

Was it even possible that something about his injury could change so fast that this archer couldn't keep up?

His arm did not get any knew bandages, or even a wiping off. Which is what Leonard would kill for right about now. The archer quickly stood up, the chair and table he lay on rattling as he did so. The man ran away, seemingly surprised by something.

Fine then. He'll just lie here in his own blood until someone else decided to clean him up.

That was a rather bleak thought. He'd rather be able to do all this by himself, yet he felt paralyzed. He couldn't move no matter what he felt others doing to him. Leonard felt like a helpless child who had just had an accident on the bed, and he knew what one looked like too, but Lisa would kill him if he started telling stories about her as a kid. But either way, he was laying in his own mess, helpless and unable to do anything about it.

"Captain Cold...." a strong voice whispered from nearby. Leonard hadn't heard the man come in, but this must have been who the archer guy got. The voice was quiet, yet demanding. This was the voice of a man who wanted something from him. Quietly, he braced himself and waited for any blows to come. These people had been caring for him, but now it appeared as if they had taken advantage of him.

But, that was quite a lot to assume based off of just a man's voice. What if he did expect something from Leonard? Why not? After taking care of him for this long, the three sure as hell deserved something from him.

Leonard heard the rolling wheels of the chair the archer had sprung from, and he also heard the gentle squeaking sound it made when the man slowly sat down in it.

There was a flare of pain from the bloodied limb. A single pressure point lit up all of the nerves that had recently been inactive. The man was poking him right in his injury.

How rude.

But hey, if he saved his life, then what's one measly little poke. He'd let his father do more to him for less.

The man's hand flattened itself against the injury, wiping away all the gooey gunk that had leaking from there. The hand worked outrageously fast, and Leonard suddenly realized that this was the man he had proclaimed as his favorite earlier. The gentle and fast one of the three.

"I hadn't expected to see you again," the man admitted, "So imagine my surprise when I decide to visit the Vanishing Point and find you,"

 Leonard attempted to frown, but his facial muscles didn't work with him. This man had seen him before, or he had at least known about him.

"However, you've healed up so great and so fast that you might be of use to me yet,"

Leonard missed the days when he was left floating in his own darkness. Sure, it lacked the company, but at least there he didn't have to worry about getting manipulated by complete assholes. He'd help this man, but once all of his debts were paid, Leonard was out of there.

"Damien's planning something that should assist you in healing yourself, and then, we'll be able to get started," the man's chair squeaked as he leaned forward, and Leonard could feel his hot breath directly on his face, "But for now, sleep," There was a sharp prick right in the middle of the bloodied flesh. The only thing stopping him from bucking and screaming was the paralytic affect the drug had on him.

Leonard felt nothing now, and everything was quiet in his darkness. This had been what he had wanted to return to escape reality. The darkness he felt and saw was all something completely artificial and made up by the bastards who took care of him. However, he couldn't bring himself to hate them, no matter how much he knew that he should. The relationship he had with the three caretakers vaguely reminded him of that of his father.

When he was younger, his father would beat him and take advantage of him, but at the end of the day, Leonard never truly hated his father until he struck Lisa. Some kind of messed of Stockholm syndrome was what he had always assumed. He thought he had been past that when he killed his father, but apparently not.

He felt his gun being pulled from his hands and wanted to scream.

His father lay in front of him. His front side blackened with frost and impaled by tiny icicles. Leonard knelt by the man and could break eye contact with his cold, dead face. He was aware of Scarlet standing behind him, probably with handcuffs already in hand so that he could get rid of him faster. He didn't know why Scarlet wasted his time on him. There were so many other people he could be focusing on, but the stubborn hero refused to let the villain walk away from him.

The speedster could have spent the rest of that day with his family or visiting children's hospitals or catching up on work, but he had stayed with him.

Eventually, Barry walked over to a window, and Leonard knew what that meant, backup had arrived. The man then left in a bolt of electricity just as reinforcements crashed into the building.

Leonard decided to tune out whatever it was the officers were saying about him. This wasn't the first time he had hallucinated this scene; hell, he could probably repeat it back to someone word for word if they had asked.

A sudden punch to the jaw distracted him from his father's frozen body.

"Hey, remember: no hits to the face!" an older policeman reprimanded the younger, "We don't want anyone catching on,"

It was Officer Fletcher. Leonard had first met the man when he and his father had passed out on the couch. The man was every bit as corrupt as Lewis had been, yet he remained on the police force.

There were kicks and punches from every angle now, and the distinct locking of an additional handcuff made him groan. In addition to the pair on his hands, these asshole locked a pair around his elbows too. His legs flailed about and kicked everyone in sight. A pair swiftly made their way on his ankles, pinching them in unpleasant ways.

He knew how the rest of this would play out. They'd beat him till he was ragged and running on fumes. They'd then taunt him for a while before standing him up and scraping his knuckles against the walls. Then, they'd lie and say he resisted arrest. It worked every time.

"We won't do that to you," a new voice startled Leonard from the memory, and a plethora of feeling came from every raw nerve ending in his body. He suddenly got a vague horror that the man knew exactly what he had been having a nightmare on.

"Damien Darhk," the man introduced himself, and Leonard felt his breath hitch, he had seen this man on TV.

He was dead.

"So were you,"

Leonard attempted to jostle his body around in an attempt of weak defiance, but that only got a psychotic laugh out of the man. He seemed to know everything that was going on in Leonard's head, and with all the meta humans around, he wouldn't be surprised to learn that one had that ability.

"I'm not a meta human. I got my abilities from something called the Khushu Idol, but I don't expect you to know anything about that," Damien laughed, as if Leonard's helplessness amused him.

Leonard wanted to squawk in offence and strangle the man, but he knew that he probably couldn't.

Didn't stop him from trying though.

His chest briefly lifted off of the hard surface before falling back down on it. He was so distracted by the fact that he could move that he hadn't noticed the man move to press him down, hard.

"You're lucky I find you funny," Damien said through gritted teeth, "But don't do anything you'll regret,"

Silently, Leonard grumbled. The second he was no longer indebted to these men he'd be gone.

"Anything new?" a new voice startled Leonard as he walked in the room. This must be the only one of the three who hasn't spoken with him yet, the archer.

"Yes, Malcolm," Damien sounded annoyed at the man's presence, something that pleased Leonard greatly, "Bring those restraints over here,"

There was a lot of complaining, but the archer finally stomped over to a cabinet and pulled them out. They were then chucked at Damien's head. Leonard weakly sniggered, these two were so married.

"For the love of everything," Damien sounded like he was about to have an aneurysm.

His movement ceased, but not because of some paralysis. Belts had been strapped around his limbs and midsection, effectively pinning him in place.

"I'd like to see you try to get out of these," Damien continued in his gloating way.

There was a sudden whoosh of wind, "Don't say that, you'll give him ideas," the first voice returned.

"Eobard," both of the men sounded reasonably annoyed.

"Hello," the man, Eobard, was close to Leonard now, he could feel puffs of his breath, "You could probably open your eyes now,"

This stumped Leonard. So long ago, when he had first been trapped in his hellhole of darkness, he had made the assumption that he was blind. Had he been wrong?

Leonard slowly and gently lifted his eyelids in disbelief. His vision was out of focus and tinged red, but it was sight. He felt his eyes water slightly at the realization that he had been wrong.

"Oh, please don't get teary eyed over this, Mr. Snart," a blond figure was standing up straight and looking, not that Leonard would ever admit this, intimidating, "I had expected so much more from you."

"Well, I'm going back to Rip," the white haired man, Damien clapped his hands together before making worryingly long eye contact with Leonard, "He's being much more entertaining right now.

Wait, Rip was here too? That was an ideal that made Leonard so happy and so sad all at the same time. He didn't like the man, but he didn't hate him either. And he certainly didn't belong here. He should be out with the team hunting down Savage or with his wife and son. What was he doing here?


End file.
